


The Worst Thing (I Woulda Swept Remix)

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Getting Together, Happy Ending, M/M, Polyamory, Remix, Steve/Tony and Steve/Bucky are established, Stuckony Server Remix Event, Tony/Bucky get together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-10 23:23:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20536334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: The Bucky in the old pictures could have swept Steve's other boyfriend off his feet, but Bucky is not that cocky young man from the pictures.





	The Worst Thing (I Woulda Swept Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I woulda swept…](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16378577) by [Winifred_Zachery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winifred_Zachery/pseuds/Winifred_Zachery). 

> For the Stuckony Server Remix Event. 
> 
> This fic is a remix of [I Woulda Swept...](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16378577) by [Winifred_Zachary!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winifred_Zachery/pseuds/Winifred_Zachery)

The worst thing was meeting Tony and realizing that Steve was lying liar who lied and he hadn’t caught him out on it. _ You were so cocky, Buck. So handsome. You could of swept anyone off their feet. _Fat chance. Bucky didn’t have a single ounce of Tony’s overpowering confidence or charm. 

Steve should change him in for the new model. 

He didn’t say that, though. If he did, he’d have to hear Steve explain all over again about how monogamy wasn’t the only choice, even though that _ wasn’t the point at all, Steve. _

“Tony, this is Bucky. Bucky, meet my boyfriend Tony.”

“So this is your vintage boyfriend!” Tony said, all smiles. Surprisingly, they looked like proper smiles, not just bared teeth. “I’ve been waiting to meet you. Steve’s been hogging you all to himself for months, always telling me to be patient and all that baloney.” 

Bucky felt like a deer in headlights. No, a fawn in headlights. If he was a deer, at least he’d have the body mass and musculature to heave himself through the windshield and take the driver out with him. This felt like he was being plowed right over and was helpless to do anything about it. 

He hadn’t thought Tony would be excited to see him. He was, after all, the _ other _ boyfriend. Surely he’d be jealous? Upset that he didn’t get Steve all to himself? Bucky had certainly felt _something _ when he found out that Steve had moved on without him and found love again, even if he hadn’t been able to untangle that feeling enough to put it into words. Kissing Steve, knowing that he was kissing someone else when Bucky wasn’t around, had been messy and strange for days before he figured out how to separate the fear from the joy and thankfulness that Steve wasn’t alone, tied to Barnes’s millstone without a buoy to keep him from being pulled down until he drowned. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” he managed to force out. 

Tony put an arm on his flesh shoulder and steered him out of the doorway and into a bright room with a semicircle of couches and bean bags around a low table. The table was covered in papers, envelopes, and thick tomes full of laminated pages. The mess cascaded onto the floor and the couch, and there were sticky notes everywhere. 

“Sorry about the mess, I thought Steve was just coming over to continue helping me with the Never-Ending Sort,” Tony said as he lead them past the seating area and into the kitchen, where he pulled out a stool and directed him onto it with a few nudges to his shoulder. “I didn’t realize today was going to be special.”

Bucky didn’t know what Steve did when he visited Tony, but he’d imagined romantic things. Walks in a nice park somewhere. Ice cream or dinner out. Flying around in one of Stark’s fancy toys. Not whatever all that paper was. 

“What’s the Never-Ending Sort?” 

“Howard had a bunch of our old stuff hanging around, and since I got back Tony and I have been sorting through it to figure out what to get rid of, what to give to whichever museum wants it, and what to keep. But there’s just so _ much _ of it to go through,” Steve explained. 

Tony went up on tip toes and pressed a quick kiss to Steve’s cheek. 

“Do you want tea, juice, coffee, or disgusting chlorophyl beverage?”

“Do you have banana-blueberry-passion fruit?”

“Yes, out of the kindness of my heart I’ve decided to keep restocking that frankenjuice for you.”

“You’re the best, Tony.”

Bucky squinted. 

“Steve. You’ve been in the future for three years now.”

“I know,” Tony chimed in as he opened the fridge. “You’d think he’d branch out beyond that one juice I fed him as a joke, and yet here I am, three years later, still having to make Jarvis order banana-blueberry-passion fruit juice.”

Bucky also thought that sounded disgusting, but he ignored the temptation to get sidetracked telling Steve so. It would just make the stubborn little punk dig his heels in even more.

“No, not that. You’ve been here for three years, and you’re still sorting through Howard’s stuff?”

Steve shrugged. “There’s a lot of it to go through.”

“He knew you for two years max, and he was almost never around that I can remember. How much can there possibly be?”

“Dad was a good old-fashioned conspiracy theorist,” Tony said from behind the open fridge door. Bucky jumped. Somehow he’d forgotten he and Steve weren’t alone. Or, not _ forgotten _ exactly, but had allowed it to slip his mind while the fridge was blocking Tony from sight. Just like that his playfulness receded like shadows before the sun. 

Hopefully Tony wouldn’t notice.

“He was always hunting down those stories,” Tony continued, “about how Steve was actually alive in Finland somewhere, fishing for a living, or that he had disappeared to Argentina to hunt down Nazis without the hinderance of the press or people recognizing him. There are literal reams of paper dedicated to proving or disproving the delusional mutterings of a drunk guy who thought he saw a big blonde out-of-towner drink all night without getting drunk. Bullshit like that goes straight through the paper shredder and into the recycling, but we still need to sort through it… _ There we go!” _

He pulled out from the fridge holding an enormous bottle of some sort of orangish-redish-brownish liquid, which he offered to Steve. It looked like poison and smelled like an entire shelf of perfume emptied into a bucket, but Steve just smiled, poured himself a big glass, and handed it back.

“Thanks, Tony.”

His smile was so big and bright, it struck Bucky dumb even though it wasn’t even aimed at him. That was the smile he longed to see, the smile that motivated him to push the boundaries of his recovery and open himself up to recovery even when it was the last thing he wanted to do.

But then he spotted the smile Tony offered in return. Where Steve was familiar, Tony was a new discovery, beckoning him to come closer, to find out just what it was about him that Steve had fallen in love with. 

Too bad he’d met Tony after he was already damaged beyond repair. If he could have become the Bucky of Steve’s stories just for one night, he’d have swept Tony off his feet.

* * *

The worst thing was trying to smile at Steve and not realizing he was doing it wrong until Steve asked what the problem was. 

“Is the noise too much? It’s supposed to be quieter this high up the Tower, but I don’t really notice much of a difference. The Serum will do that to you.” An oversized arm snaked around his shoulders and pulled him comfortingly against the rest of Steve’s comforting bulk. 

Bucky blinked, then raised a tentative finger to trace his lips. His smile had come out as a grimace. 

“It’s not a problem.”

Maybe if he lied and acted like it was just the noise getting to him, then Steve wouldn’t realize that he was so messed up he couldn’t even smile right anymore. But lying to Steve always made him feel oily and gross inside. (Except when he was lying to make Steve feel better. That was different.)

“Are you sure?”

No, he was not. The century had turned, like an unstoppable wheel rolling ever onward, and he felt like he had been run over by it. In his mind’s eye, deep tire tread marks marred his entire back. He felt alienated from everyone and everything except Steve, felt closer to Steve than to his own body, could finally go outside with Steve and have a romantic night out all proper and open and everything, and he couldn’t even muster up a proper smile for him. 

“Yeah, I’m sure. Hey, how’s that thing with Tony going? The Never-Ending Sort?”

Steve shrugged. 

“Still no end in sight. I’d swear Tony was fabricating this stuff as some sort of elaborate plot to lure me into the penthouse if I wasn’t absolutely positive Tony was just as bored as I am.”

“Find anything interesting?”

Steve shrugs, but it’s an _ I’m using body language so I don’t have to use real language _ shrug. Suspicious. 

“Steve. What did you find?”

“Nothing, really! Just some old pictures. Most of them are obviously staged, meant for newspaper propaganda.”

Bucky opened his mouth to retort, but the words got lodged in his throat. _ I know you’re hiding something, _ he wanted to say, but the shape of the words just wouldn’t come. His tongue lay flat and dead in his mouth. Russian blurred with English blurred with German blurred with sense memory, forming a knot far too big to fit through his mouth, even if he dislocated his jaw. 

The plates on the arm shifted as frustration locked the flesh arm rigidly in place. The old Bucky’s words never betrayed him like this. _ His _words were quick and slick and so simple to speak. 

_ Stupid. _ How could someone who struggled even to speak and smile hope to seduce someone like Tony Stark? He only had Steve because he’d been dashing enough to win his heart while he had the opportunity. 

* * *

The worst thing was seeing the photo and seeing more of Tony in it than himself.

The man in the photo was cocky, hat tipped at a jaunty angle. It looked natural to see him laughing, to see him hanging out with other people and looking at the camera like he was challenging it. 

Steve was right to hide this from him. It was hard enough to hang on to himself when he was in charge of what his _ self _was. The faded old picture was like a dash of cold water on his fragile optimism.

He didn’t even realize Tony had entered the room until he felt a hand patting him hesitantly on the shoulder. The realization that he’d been staring into space, radiating self-pity sent a little flare of shame blazing across his face. 

“There’s more like that if you want them, but I totally get it if you don’t. I’ve got a solid decade’s worth of photos from when I was a very different person that I wish weren’t enshrined on the internet forever.” Tony’s voice was just as hesitant as his hands, but that did little to cover the unbearable kindness there.

Bucky focused on not letting the fluttering arm plates shred the photo. 

“That’s okay. Steve can have it.”

“Oh. Okay.” He could feel Tony’s gaze burning on his already hot and slightly damp cheeks, but thankfully he didn’t mention them. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t feel like Steve and I were hogging all the history. I didn’t mean to… intrude. It’s just, Jarvis said you might appreciate a little company. But if you don’t that’s okay too! I can- I can go.”

Bucky’s arm muscles unconsciously clenched tighter around the delicate photo, and it bent around his rigid fingers. 

“I don’t feel like you’re hogging anything. You and Steve started this whole project before you even knew I was alive. You should get to finish it together too. I was just going to take a quick look at some of the stuff Steve wanted to keep. I’ll give it back to him when he gets back.”

“What about the rest of it?” Tony gestured at the piles of papers and the stack of photo albums in danger of toppling into Bucky’s lap. 

Bucky kind of wanted to flee, kind of wanted to rip up the picture, and kind of wanted to ugly cry. Instead, he shrugged.

“I thought I was ready to see them, but I guess not. I’ll just have to try again later.”

Tony’s hands slid under his own, gently positioning them so he could look at the picture. 

“I must say, honey, you look _ good _ in that jacket. If I hated the taste of ink and paper a little less, I might just lick this.”

Oh god, that felt like a punch in the gut. Tony would have liked him _ before. _ For a short second, he could see it; the old him, Steve, and Tony, all walking together, happy and confident and _ happy, _ like they were made of sunshine and nothing could ever bring them down.

“I miss it,” he said, voice low and scratchy. “I miss being so carefree and confident. I’d have swept you off your feet, doll. Taken you dancing with Steve and whisper sweet things in your ear that you could never repeat in respectable conversation. Now look at me; I can barely have a normal conversation with you.”

“I’m sure you’ve still got it,” Tony said lightly. “Besides, Steve’s hardly a poet and we got together just fine.”

“I don’t know,” Bucky said. “I’m pretty sure you’re firmly out of my league these days.”

For the first time since entering the room, Tony’s eyes locked onto his.

“Why don’t you give it a try anyway?” He said in a crushed velvet voice that shivered down Bucky’s back like it could tap directly into his nervous system. “Come on. What do you have to loose?”

Just like that his throat began to undergo desertification. Tony’s words had just stolen all the water from his mouth, leaving behind a dry husk of a tongue. How could he speak? The only reason he could get with Steve was because they were already bound so tightly nothing short of death could unbind them. But Tony was the bright one, the confident one, the one who could walk down the street with Steve laughing like he was made of sunshine. Steve could have Tony, but never Bucky.

And yet. 

In a fantasy, fairytale universe where he could have whatever he wanted, he would ask to be with Steve and Tony at the drop of a hat. 

“Hey doll, wanna help me polish the knife in my pocket?”

Tony threw back his head and laughed, whooping and triumphant.

“I’d love to!”

* * *

The best thing was cuddling on Tony’s sweep-you-off-your-feet bed. He felt like he was lying in the bed of a fairytale princess in some sort of luscious, over-the-top production with such decadent set design that it was hard to pay attention to the actors long enough to follow the plot. 

Tony smiled sleepily down at him from one side, and Steve from the other. Sunshine streamed in through the window, and his whole body was cozy and light.


End file.
